My heart sank as I listened to President Tump speak before reducing Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments to tiny slivers of their original size.
He lauded the governor, senators, members of Congress, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He seemed unconcerned about the land itself. Maybe he sees land as dirt. Politics, not land and its place in a civil society, seem to be his concern.
Seventy years ago, a professor at Texas A&M held up a handful of soil to us students in a graduate soil genesis class. He said that if anyone called it dirt, he would fail the class. Soil is the living skin of the earth, the basis for the spiritual and biological actions necessary for human existence.
Two years later, I was a new Ph.D. with a job teaching and doing research on rangelands in Utah. I’ll never forget the day my wife, my baby son and I entered southeastern Utah. I was prepared for the scientific challenges waiting for me, but the spiritual effect of that red rock land surprised me. My major professor, Vernon Young, herded sheep there before the Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management existed. He tried to prepare me, but its emotional impact has to be experienced, not proclaimed.
Now, more than seven decades after that land entered my psyche, many of my students, and their offspring, are successful ranchers, forest rangers, wildlife officers, BLM specialists, teachers, bankers, writers and business leaders in that emotion-raising area. I can’t remember the number of deer hunts and outings among the Red Rocks. Or the times I served on boards and panels with folks who looked to that land for their livelihood.
To me, Trump’s downsizing of national monuments is a loud and clear statement that our elected officials will sacrifice land belonging to all of us for the benefit of a few. That lack of respect for land must not go unchallenged. It may take decades before legal issues about the monuments are settled. In the meantime, who will protect the land from millions of global visitors who, because of the publicity over land ownership, have only recently found our remote jewel exists? Make no mistake, whether we are ready or not, they will come.
The land Trump would remove from the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments primarily consists of remote areas managed by the U.S. Departments of Interior and Agriculture, plus sprinklings of state and privately owned lands. None of these have adequate funds or personnel to protect such vast areas of past human occupation and some of the world’s best prehistoric sites against the sure to come visitors. Those lands must be protected while we argue.
We citizens should demand that 1) Congress authorize and fund an interagency board to protect and manage land within the original proclamations of the national monuments until the legal questions are settled by the courts and 2) Contact and fund the National Academy of Science to evaluate the importance of the national monuments and make recommendations for the future.
Thad Box is professor emeritus in the Quinney College of Natural Resources at Utah State University, serving as dean of the college from 1970 to 1990.